Ribbon
by WingLancir
Summary: Advent Children. Rufus. Beware yaoi.


The moonlight was kind. Where its pale rays fell across his skin, one could almost imagine the dark rot aching there nothing more than shadows. Insubstantial. Mere tricks of the light across pure alabaster flesh, white like ivory.

So pale, Rufus-sama. His mother's voice, teasing, when 'sama' was a six year old child lost in the folds of her sequined evening gown. Rufus, darling. You'll burn if you stand in direct sunlight.

What he wouldn't give for sunlight strong enough to burn him clean.

The bandages unraveled like his sanity, slipping down bare skin to pool carelessly on the floor and on the bed. Like snakes, he thought absently, listening to the quiet slither of spooling cloth. Snakes made of white. The kind with yellow diamonds picked out in pattern on their perfect scales, that wrapped around you and squeezed and squeezed until you couldn't breathe.

It was over his heart now. The marks waltzed up his arm and shoulder like the tracks of some wild beast. It might have been a stain, if one didn't know any better, some mark left over from a disagreement with a vat of purple dye or several gallons of grape juice. It might have been bruises. They had told him it was bruises in the beginning, when the first plum colored tint had begun on the inside of his wrist. Soft flesh there. Easily damaged. Tseng had taken it in his long graceful hands when he would not stop rubbing at the mark unconsciously.

Don't worry at it, Rufus-sama.

How he'd worried. How he'd worried later, because Tseng's cool mouth on the flesh had momentarily stopped its vague, achy heat, but that was before they knew it for the sign of a plague.

A mark or two they could explain away as bruises. Indeed, Rufus didn't think anything of them. The headaches were commonplace enough as well, one could even say a distinctive mark of the competent businessman who lived from paper pile to paper pile of progress reports.

Maybe you need glasses, eh? You're wearing out your eyes on all these numbers.

Numbers are the lifeblood of a company, Reno.

Tseng says you're working too hard.

Tseng worries too much. Hand me that bottle of painkillers, will you.

You pop these things like a junkie, sir.

We all have our vices that get us through the day, Rude. You should see the stash Reeve has hidden in his locker.

Bruises. Headaches. Such small, simple things. He was exhausted, but everyone was exhausted. It had fallen on his shoulders to single handedly rebuild ShinRa, not to mention civilized society itself in Midgar. Domino didn't have the resources to pull his drowning city from the whirlpool. Rufus did, provided he could wrest them from the stupid, the stubborn and the corrupt who had flourished under his father's policies. The new President was not out to become his father's son, or even to prove a point to an old bastard several years gone and unmourned. That Rufus Shinra, as he so often said, had died when Diamond WEAPON blew his office to hell.

Does that make you a zombie then, Rufus-sama? Elena no longer stumbled over herself talking to him. Somewhere between the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, she'd grown out of being a rookie and grown into the sleek, deadly elegance of her former idol, Tseng. Rufus could hardly pretend he wasn't pleased about it. Now if only Rude could beat some sense of sophistication into Reno's punk ass.

Zombies don't have to deal with paperwork. He'd paused, then, a hand going to forehead as the world momentarily spun. He hid it by raking his bangs back. A little sleep deprivation wouldn't kill him, and Elena, working on her own pile of paperwork, didn't seem to have noticed.

You could always take up smoking, she replied, sliding the pen between her lips in mime. A little accidental fire in the inbox would cut down on your workload.

Do I look like Captain Highwind?

Only from the back, sir.

The world went gray. The comment he'd been about to make in response got lost somewhere between him staggering into the wall and falling in a dead faint to the floor.

Minutes or hours or days later, consciousness slunk back like a whipped dog. He opened his eyes to blurry white. The ceiling of a medical ward.

Sleep deprivation wouldn't kill him. Bruises wouldn't. Headaches wouldn't. All three put together came with a fever, and a low burning ache in his skin, and a name.

They call it Geostigma, Rufus-sama, and the young President had never before heard that note in Tseng's imperturbable voice. Worry, apprehension, concern, all those. But never fear.

They had a silent epidemic on their hands. If Rufus hadn't been sick already he would have almost certainly caught something, worrying himself into a pale shade. His city at risk. His life in danger. Plague, damn uncurable plague, that defied both magic and medicine, and all of his Turks had been exposed by their proximity to him.

How he'd worried for all of them when the stains to began spread along with the rumors in the streets. When the mysterious bruises did not fade into yellow and green but remained that dark violent color of a thunderstorm, and then began to grow and contort to match the descriptions of so many other cases. When it bloomed horribly on his temple and took the sight from that eye, so that he could not see the fear in the faces of those around him.

Don't touch me, please, I appear to be dying.

He missed Reno's lanky form in his bed at night, sprawled across the designer sheets like he owned them, moaning like a whore when it pleased him to be taken or growling out his pleasure in the taking. He missed Rude's silence, in the words he didn't whisper, and the delicacy of his touch which had always seemed so odd in a man who could break legs with his bare hands. He missed Elena's tiny sighs in his ear, the way she bit her lower lip and the little adjusting wiggle of her hips when she slid onto him, he missed watching Tseng watching them and knowing it looked like a pair of siblings indulging in a little incest. Reeve was a good man and a steady lover, but this was Turk business and non-Turks were….simply not involved in the same way. The fact that Reeve and Tseng had a professional, courteous Arrangement (one that, admittedly, resembled nothing so much as the unthinking passion of the very repressed, and had even won done-it-all-or-at-least-read-about-it-inna-porno-mag-once Reno's grudging admiration) had nothing to do with the fact that Tseng occasionally found it necessary to shove Rufus' paperwork to the side of his desk so he might be bent over it and fucked properly. It had nothing to do with Reno routinely having his back pressed up against a graffiti covered alley wall or bathroom stall or elevator door or conference room wall and his teeth fastened in Rude's shoulder to muffle a screaming orgasm. Or, in any of those same locations, it had nothing to do with Reno on his knees and Rude's hands clenching and unclenching in that convenient ponytail. It had nothing to do with the boys Elena dated, or the ones she took home.

It had nothing to do with anything except Turk business. One couldn't call it loyalty as such. Rufus had commanded loyalty before.

Devotion, then.

They were i his /i Turks, all of them, and he belonged to them as much as they belonged to him. There had been others over the years, some nothing more than names in his memory and some great gaping holes in his life, but these were what he had left. His. His own. And he would not be parted from them willingly.

He could not risk their illness. Despite the baffled findings of the doctors that the disease did not seem to be contagious between human or animal carriers, he could not and would not risk it. In the early stages he ordered them out of his bed and they were gone. He ordered them out of his sight and they were scarce.

He tried to order them out of his life completely, and broke down and wept.

We will not leave, Rufus-sama. We refuse.

The bandages around his useless eye were wet with tears. Please, he begged, although the President of Shinra did not beg, but they were alone and the President didn't exist when they were alone. A sick, pain ridden young man with darkly flaming skin and a cracked, raw voice took his place and begged for their safety.

Please.

Midgar needs you, Rufus-sama, and you need us.

We aren't going anywhere, yo.

That's right.

Did Midgar need him? Sometimes he wondered. Midgar surely didn't need the wavering attention of a near invalid, a haunted wraith under a white sheet. The wheelchair was now a hated necessity. His illness was kept from the public, and the subterfuge required the very rare public appearance or speech, but he would not be able to continue the charade for much longer. Midgar didn't need a sick President at the helm of ShinRa. Internal strife and squabbling would tear the company apart. Midgar didn't need a man who tossed in fever nearly every night and could not bear his altered reflection in the mirror.

The people here need something to believe in. You are the future, Rufus-sama.

Be careful, Elena. Please don't stand so close to me.

I'm not afraid of getting sick, sir.

I am. Please stand back.

And someone certainly needed to keep the remnants of AVALANCHE and their allies in line. Strife, it seemed, still responded best to authority that he disliked.

The door would close and Cloud's irritated footsteps would fade, and Rufus would sit back in his wheelchair, headache pounding so hard underneath the white sheet he was surprised the fabric wasn't trembling from it. It was worth it, usually. The blond was always angry, but he would do what was asked of him. Rufus had had great success with training difficult and dangerous predators to heel. His father might have lived longer if he'd only gone about the process with a little more dedication in regards to Sephiroth.

Sephiroth. Now there was a falcon one might take pride in mastering, if it could be done at all. Not the mad angel, of course. The man that had lived before the destructive legend, seen through keyholes and in hallways from behind the safety of his bodyguards. A man whose face hadn't changed at all while Rufus grew up. A man who, once upon a time, had spent a rainy afternoon painstakingly teaching a small boy to play chess.

Rufus had promised in return to show him how to play Go Fish. And did, much to the astonishment of Rufus' mother when she returned to collect her ward and to the astonishment of the dark haired SOLDIER who came to collect his superior officer.

Sephiroth had pinned Rufus' father to his desk with the Masamune like a bug on a pin, and yet Rufus remembered the startled expression on that too perfect face when he'd announced that the great General Sephiroth had won his first game of Go Fish.

Isn't it astonishing what you remember about people.

Isn't it.

I am not Sephiroth, the man with cat slit eyes had purred at him, kneeling there in his black leather and insulting Rufus' malady with his mocking, sharp smile. But I could be.

You aren't, the young President had wanted to say wearily. You aren't even a pale imitation. At your best, you are only a shadow of his madness, and you don't know how to play Go Fish.

Insane bastard.

Tseng had first brought the matter to his attention. Tseng always did. He was far too efficient like that.

There were rumors, he had reported diffidently, standing in front of Rufus' overpiled desk, and he might have been repeating hearsay about a new restaurant that had opened or progress on the communications tower. There were rumors about a man who claimed to be able to cure Geostigma. His name is whispered like a god's on the streets.

There is only one god on my streets, Tseng.

As you say, sir.

Bring him to me.

But the man vanished like smoke over water. Not difficult in a city the size of Midgar. They chased rumors and phantoms clues, wild stories and secondhand accounts.

This is ridiculous. The man's a ghost.

I'm gonna make him a ghost when we find him, yo, for causing all this goddamn work for us.

Killing him would defeat the purpose of finding him and bringing him back, Reno.

So?

And they never did find him. He found them.

Bent over paperwork one night, his remaining sighted eye struggling to focus on the text that kept blurring in an out of focus, Rufus heard the muffled noises outside his office and didn't bother to look up. He reached quite calmly under his desk and, when the door swung open, unloaded his double barrel shotgun into the figure there without hesitation.

Hello, said Sephiroth, after the bullets had bounced off his strange double blade and shattered some windows. I've heard you were looking for me. May I come in?

You are not Sephiroth.

Oh no. My name is Kadaj. And you are Rufus Shinra.

The smile was what decided it for him. This thing with Sephiroth's eyes and Sephiroth's hair was mad. Mad and misguided and powerful enough to destroy everything he had spent the last two years rebuilding. It talked about Jenova and its siblings and Reunion and Sephiroth and Rufus wondered, privately, if he could kill a god the same way Cloud had.

Best not to experiment. Cloud hadn't been in a wheelchair.

With all the grace that his father had never learned, Rufus carefully asked a mad goshawk to step onto his glove. It might not fly for him, but he would cultivate a connection with it anyway, and it would be dealt with. Eventually.

The Turks hated Kadaj and he knew it. He went out of his way to encourage their animosity.

I could be Sephiroth, the clone would whisper, leaning in close the way Rufus had forbidden all others to. I could be the angel of vengeance that killed your father. Would you like that, little boy? Would you like me to work for you, the way he did for your dear old dad?

Do you play Go Fish?

What?

I'll have to consider it.

Rufus watched his leather clad hips when he sauntered out. Sephiroth had never walked like an open invitation. Sephiroth hadn't whispered things that alternately chilled or boiled Rufus' blood. Sephiroth hadn't traced his gloved fingers over the confines of the bandages, calling up the sickness within to respond to his touch. The ache moved with his fingertips and didn't stop when they reached his belt.

Doesn't it hurt, Kadaj crooned in his ear. I know it hurts. Can I make it better for you?

The bandages unraveled in the moonlight, criss crossing the bed like ribbons. Kadaj's hair glowed molten silver. His eyes were lost in it, and he might have been the ghost Rude had claimed him to be, standing there watching.

Cloth slipped over Rufus' blind eye. He hadn't loosened it but down it came anyway. He didn't remember taking off his jacket, either, but he must have. Tseng would take his jacket at the door and hang it up, or Reno would grin that infuriating grin and toss it haphazardly over the back of a chair, or Elena would slide it off his shoulders so it pinioned his arms…..

Kadaj was next to him, his hands a mass of bandages. He let them drop and they peeled away from the stains on Rufus' body like shedding skin. If only they would go with. If only he could claw off this outer skin and leave the marks on it, and find his flesh underneath unblemished.

It hurt. It ached. It burned, and Kadaj's mouth was neither cool nor soothing to him.

Aren't you going to tell me not to kiss you? I might get sick.

You won't get sick.

I suppose not.

Don't kiss me anyway.

The sound of a zipper was very loud in the quiet. Kadaj's favored black leather was evidently a little too constricting, and Rufus helped him out of it without looking. His blind eye was shut and the one that retained vision wasn't seeing anything at all. Shadows of the past, perhaps. Other lovers. It wasn't looking at cat eyes and smiles with too much fang, or a fall of platinum silver hair that trailed over his torso and lower. Sephiroth's hair.

He shuddered.

Squirm for me, human.

Rufus could do that. He did. Squirming was near instinctive, when his body reacted helplessly to something in Kadaj's touch that had never stirred for any other.

Blood to blood, cell to cell. Jenova sleeps within you.

Stop talking nonsense and fuck me.

Kadaj could do that. He did. And Rufus writhed under him and the thing under his skin writhed at the same time and he cried out at the burn of it, cried out at the awful tearing echo in his mind. Sephiroth. Jenova. Cloud. Sephiroth.

He touched Cloud's nightmares, all the way across the city, and saw a familiar man with spiky black hair smiling at something, saw a flower girl on her knees with a blade through her heart, before Cloud rocketed awake, retching. He knew the name Kadaj for an instant before it was gone and there was only the burning pulse of the Geostigma in his arm as he curled around in agony.

You didn't tell me you were sick. Jenova and her toys are beyond my control, Cloud. You never told me you were sick.

He was moved against his will in this awareness, moved to touch the children's sleeping minds, and he arced from one to another like lightning. Kadaj was there in their dreams, beckoning. Black water swirled lazily around his hips and in his cupped hands as he raised it. Drink of this and you will be given the greatest gift, he whispered, and the two pale shadows standing behind him on the shore echoed the words. Drink of this. Drink of me. His voice promised them a cure for the fire that burned in their blood and colored their skin, if only they would follow and obey.

He touched a dark red fog of memory and recoiled in horror at what he found there. Even Jenova Herself, echoing through the puppet being that drove into Rufus' body in the same rhythm that he drove into Rufus' mind, was reluctant to linger. The wind stirred a ragged crimson cloak and Vincent's gold, razor tipped claw twitched in his dreaming. Kadaj. He would remember the name Kadaj.

There were others. Some were not human.

Niisan.

Niisama.

Sephiroth in triplicate, standing in the forest of the Ancients. Black water reflecting the lights like stars. Black water and quicksilver skin and green, slit pupiled eyes. Veni, veni, venias.

Rufus closed his eyes, or tried to, and pretended he didn't exist. His body reminded him that he did, very much so, with the orgasm that jolted through his nerves like an electric shock. Suddenly he was back in himself, gasping for air and sobbing or moaning something incoherent, fingers clutching at the sheets as Kadaj rode him hard to finish. The clone whispered Mother before he came, and when he fell forward, he leaned down almost reverently to kiss Rufus, and Rufus let him.

You'll meet my brothers very soon, Kadaj said much later, running a hand through his sweaty bangs. Rufus said nothing. He was looking up at the shadow massed ceiling with his good eye. The dark purple blots on his flesh seem to pulse faintly in time with his sated heartbeat, but his mind still raced.

Veni, veni, venias.

There were three of them.

Cloud was sick. He carried the mark of tainted blood.

Does it still hurt, little princeling? Kadaj was looking at him again, and even madness couldn't hide the hunger in his expression. I can make it all better for you, if you come when Mother calls.

Rufus said nothing. Lips moved on his bruised skin, on the closed lid of the blind eye, and he could pretend it was another's breath ghosting over his face. The falconer does not stir under a restless bird's talons, though they pierce the glove and draw blood. A falconer must be patient.

A gloved fingertip rested against the flutter of his pulse. Little princeling. Even kings are beneath angels. Won't you come when you are called? Won't you come with me?

Go Fish, Rufus said.

Kadaj had already lost his first game.


End file.
